#I'm in the process of a paradigm shift

[kittytheroseofkirea]

What if I don't want to wait until new years to make new goals or start working on things?

[taffywabbit]

right now I kinda feel like I've just gone through an entire season of character development in the span of like a week. I'm very tired, physically and emotionally (I also just cleaned my whole bathroom at 1am, because sometimes when you're already on a streak of dealing with difficult/unpleasant/tiring stuff it's easiest to just keep knocking out more of those things while you've at least got that momentum) but at the same time I feel weirdly powerful and fulfilled as a person right now. the sigh-and-flop-onto-the couch-with-my-phone I just did felt a lot more earned than it has in a while

[crystalclearwright]

I don't think this is a bad series; just a bad Loki series. Making him OP at the last minute doesn't change my opinion that his "character development" seemed rushed and ignored about 99.9% of his prior development. "The perfect ending" doesn't justify a terrible build-up.

I have always firmly believed that Loki's villainous actions were mainly inspired by the worst case of unchecked 'Daddy Issues' in the universe, and that any positive, seamless and plausible character development would have to involve addressing and overcoming those particular issues. Just hearing Odin say "I love you" and calling him "Son" wouldn't be enough; it would be a long, painful, messy, multilayered healing process with more ups-and-downs than the world's oldest seesaw, and getting through it without Odin's explicit approval might be the only way he can truly overcome those issues.

Figuring out where he stands with Thor would be essential as well. He seriously attempted to murder Thor, and everyone just brushes it off on some "Oh well, boys will be boys!" crap. I believe he truly loves Thor, but that he loves Odin that much more, and he obviously blames Thor a great deal for Odin's (perceived) favoritism and abandonment. Loki must accept that even if Thor had deliberately overshadowed him, Odin alone is responsible for his unequal treatment of them. This would go hand-in-hand with realizing that Odin isn't the "perfect" being he always idolized him as, which Loki already started doing in Dark World (e.g., pointing out Odin's hypocritical warmongering).

Furthermore, I don't see why every beloved villain must die in battle and/or become a hero to earn their glory. There are other destinies to explore beyond 'Hero' and 'Villain'. I believe Loki is an overall decent person and deserves a chance to prove it, but the MCU doesn't need any more full-blown altruists. I think Loki should live primarily for his own separate and unique interests.

And despite any changes he undergoes, I think Loki should always be mischievous by nature just as Thor has always been valorous by nature. Mischief is an essential component to social evolution, after all; it is virtually impossible to shift or expand paradigms without causing some measure of discomfort and disorder. Mischief in itself catches people off-guard and forces them to learn and/or reveal things about themselves that were once hidden from themselves and/or others. In a fanfiction I'm writing, Loki will explain that he earned his "trickster" reputation by challenging social norms and putting people in vulnerable positions for the sake of knowledge, freedom and evolution, not solely for entertainment.

[astriiformes]

Hi, i just learned about the scientific revolution in europe at school. Can you tell me why you dont think scientific revolutions exist? im curious!

So I feel like I have to lead with the fact that I'm kind of arguing two different points when I say scientific revolutions aren't really a thing

One is that I'm objecting to a specific, extremely foundational theory of scientific revolutions that was put forth by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, which I think really misrepresents how science is actually practiced in the name of fitting things to a nice model. The other is that I think the fundamental problem with the idea is that it's too vague to effectively describe an actual process that happens.

It's certainly true that there are important advances in science that get referred to as "revolutions" that fundamentally changed their fields -- the shift from the Ptolemaic model of the Solar System to the Copernican one, Darwin's theory of evolution, etc. But there are historians of science (who I tend to agree with) that feel that terming these advances "revolutions" ignores the fact that science is an continuous, accretional process, and somewhat sensationalizes the process of scientific change in the name of celebrating particular scientists or theories over others.

Kuhn's model that he put forth in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (which is one of those books that itself stirred a great deal of activity in a number of fields) suggests science evolves via what he called "paradigm shifts," where new ideas become fundamentally incompatible with the old model or way of doing things, causing a total overturn in the way scientists see the world, and establishing a new paradigm -- which will eventually cave to another when it, too, ceases to function effectively as a model. This theory became extraordinarily popular when it was published, but it's somewhat telling who it's remained popular with. Economists, political scientists, and literary theorists still use Kuhn, but historians of science, in my experience at least, see his work as historically significant but incompatible with how history is actually studied.

Kuhn posits that between paradigm shifts there are periods of "normal science" where paradigms are unquestioned and anomalies in the current model are largely ignored, until they reach a critical mass and cause a scientific revolution. In reality though, there is often real discussion of those anomalies, and I think the scientific process is not nearly so content to ignore them as Kuhn thinks. Throughout history, we see people expressing a real discontent with unsolved mysteries the current scientific model fails to explain, and glossing over those simply because the individuals in question didn't manage to formulate breakthrough theories to "solve" those problems props up the somewhat infamous "great men" model of history of science, where we focus only on the most famous people in the field as significant instead of acknowledging that science is a social enterprise and no research happens in a vacuum!

Beyond disagreeing with Kuhn specifically though, I think the idea of scientific revolutions vastly simplifies how science evolves and changes, and is ultimately a really ahistorical way of thinking about shifts in thinking. Take the example of the shift from Ptolemaic, geocentric thought to the heliocentric Copernican model of the solar system. When does this supposed "revolution" in thought actually start, and when does it "end" by becoming firmly established? You could argue that the publication of Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543 was the beginning of the shift in thinking -- but of course, then you have the problem of asking where Copernicus' ideas came from in the first place.

The "great men" model of history would suggest Copernicus was a uniquely talented individual who managed to suggest something no one else had ever put forth, but realistically, he was influenced by the scientists who came before him, just like anyone else. There were real objections to the Ptolemaic model during the medieval era! One of the most famous problems in medieval astronomy was the fact that assuming a geocentric model makes the behavior of the planets seem really weird to an observer on Earth, referred to as retrograde motion, which had to be solved with a complicated system of epicycles that people knew wasn't quite working, even if they weren't able to put together exactly why. There were even ancient Greek astronomers who suggested that the sun was at the center of the solar system, going all the way back to Aristarchus of Samos who lived from around 310-230 BCE!

Putting an end point to the Copernican revolution poses similar challenges. Some people opt to suggest that what Copernicus started, either Galileo or Newton finished (which in and of itself means the "revolution" lasted around 100-150 years), but are we defining the shift in terms of new theories, or the consensus of the scientific community? The latter is much harder to pinpoint, and in my opinion as an aspiring historian of science, also much more important. Again, science doesn't happen in a vacuum. Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton may be more famous than their peers, but that doesn't mean the rest of the Renaissance scientific community didn't matter.

Ultimately it's a matter of simple models like Kuhn's (or other definitions of scientific revolutions) being insufficient to explain the complexity of history. Both because science is a complex endeavor, and because it isn't independent from the rest of history. Sure, it's genuinely amazing to consider that Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and the anatomist Andreas Vesalius' similarly influential De humani corporis fabrica were published the same year, and it says something about the intellectual climate of the time. But does it say something about science only, or is it also worth remembering that the introduction of typographic printing a century prior drastically changed how scientists communicated and whose ideas stuck and were remembered? On a similar note, we credit Darwin with suggesting the theory of evolution (and I could write a similarly long response just on the many, many influences in geology and biology both that went into his formulation of said theory), but what does it say that Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the theory of natural selection around the same time? Is it sheer coincidence, or does it have more to do with conversations that were already happening in the scientific community both men belonged to that predated the publication of the Origin?

I think that the concept of scientific revolutions is an important part of the history of the history of science, and has its place when talking about how we conceive of certain periods of history. But I'm a skeptic of it being a particularly accurate model, largely on the grounds of objecting to the "great men" model of history and the idea that shifts in thinking can be boiled down to a few important names and dates.

There's a famous Isaac Newton quote (which, fittingly, did not originate with Newton himself, but can be traced back even further to several medieval thinkers) in which he states "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." I would argue that science, as an endeavor, is far more like standing on the shoulder of several hundred thousand other people in a trenchcoat. This social element of research is exactly why it's so hard to pull apart any one particular revolution, even when fairly revolutionary theories change the direction of the research that's happening. Ideas belong to a long evolutionary chain, and even if it occasionally goes through periods of punctuated equilibrium, dividing that history into periods of revolution and stagnancy ignores the rich scientific tradition of the "in-between" periods, and the contributions of scientists who never became famous for their work.

[dragonpyre]

I was talking to my grandmother in the car today, and we were talking about shows with crossovers, and she mentions

"Oh and there's the programs from 7 to 10 that I watch, and they crossover with each other all the time. Grey's anatomy, a firefighter show called 911, that one about the police-"

"Wait, 911? So you know, like, Eddie and Buck?"

"Mhm."

"And the beenado???"

"Yep!"

And I had to sit there and process the paradigm shifting fact that my grandma watches the same crazy show you put on my dash

xD There's no escape from it. It's everywhere

Tbf it is one of the most popular shows currently airing, so I'm not totally surprised

[rei-ismyname]

How do you think about the krakoan resurrections, narratively, I’ve been reading more of the Krakoan line and while I’ve enjoyed the worldbuilding and the plotting related to the resurrection process(like how big of a deal it was for the secret to get out), I do appreciate it’s gone.

I feel letting everyone have a get out of jail free card, with exceptions to people who don’t want to get brought back(even then that didn’t work, good one Erik), spoils the stakes a little, and also funny in a morbid sort of way that despite all their suicide missions and long odds, it’s only now that our major xmen are dropping off like flies for these multiple deaths.

Apologies if this was incoherent, just observations i have reading so far

Worry not, it coheres well enough! A great question :).

I love it! I thought it was an amazing achievement for the mutants to have and a luminous yet fraught foundation to build a country and culture around. Five mutants working in concert to resurrect people! What a concept, and the mutant circuit itself was taken to exciting places even when it was mundane. It was a compelling developing world building choice in the need for secrecy while still being quite fragile. There's not as much redundancy as they'd like, for instance - though fortunately they didn't all die at once.

Of course, the flipside of that is how the worst person on the island managed to subvert it and burn the universe. That was fun too. It's no small thing to have power over life and death, and even seeing the younger mutants become so cavalier about it felt new and interesting.

Comic book deaths rarely feel like anything more than a setback, and the convoluted or unexplained ways people return tend to feel rote and predictable. I can't get excited about a solicit saying 'next issue an X-Man dies!' or similar because I know it's a temporary inconvenience to goose sales. In most cases creators already know when or how they're coming back. I didn't really see it as a get out of jail free card - more a paradigm shift that challenged writers to introduce more interesting stakes.

Taking that arbitrary, low stakes genre convention and pushing it to its logical endpoint struck me as a clever way to move past that tiresome sensationalism. Death doesn't have to be the only stakes, especially when mutants have more to lose than ever. A nation, vulnerable to external threats. A society built on quicksand. Bad faith actors living next door. Geopolitics! Any mutant can return without preamble to this brave new world, for good or ill. It wasn't a perfect safety net either - Otherworld, Arakko, dying publicly, the secrecy, requiring proof of death, the clone issue, etc all altered the paradigm with new stakes.

In short, HoxPoX stopped pretending that death was final or even meaningful and found new stakes to explore. I don't think Krakoa would have been as powerful without it, narratively and thematically. The fact that warriors were prioritised and precogs secretly banned set up dominos to explode in everyone's face. Mainly Chuck and Mags. The power they exercised over Mystique, for example, was so fucked up. That was always going to ignite and it didn't disappoint. They solved for death but they didn't solve for life - and that's the tricky part. As powerful as resurrection is, it's just as powerful a thing to have weaponised against you.

I do wish we got a book about The Five as characters, exploring their family unit, the pressure and position, the religious awe surrounding them. They're all pretty interesting people who barely knew each other beforehand (except Egg and Tempus.) They appeared in books here and there, but X-Factor and IXM (and HoxPoX to a degree) were their most substantial appearances. COVID happened at a terrible time for X-Men comics and messed up publication but I'm still happy with what we got.

As for how I feel about resurrection protocols being off the table (except for Chuck, apparently. Nevermind that it doesn't work that way) - it was inevitable and I think I've mostly just accepted it. From The Ashes is very back to basics and it wouldn't really fit, so I'm happy it's not being used RN. Definitely think R-LDS is a cynical and shallow idea taking shots at something wonderful for little gain.

Thanks for the ask! I hope it makes sense.

[laughhardrunfastbekindsblog]

To all the Bad Batch fans who are also MCU fans:

Do y'all remember when Endgame came out, Natasha Romanoff sacrificed her life just for a chance at everyone else returning, and the most she got in terms of grieving was a short scene of some of the other Avengers crying with Hulk throwing a bench, and a vague reference at the end? While Tony Stark got not only several extended goodbye sequences, but also a funeral/memorial. And fans brought up the discrepancy and their disappointment, because Tony DID deserve such a send off, but so did Nat.

This is how I, as a massive Tech fan, feel about the "closure" we got in the show regarding Tech's death and its impact on the other characters. Except it hurts even worse in Tech's case, because the only finality about his death came at the very end of the show and was basically "he's dead by default" since he hadn't come back, whereas with Nat we at least got reliable confirmation of her death so we could process it early on.

I love the Bad Batch. I appreciate the finale even more after a rewatch (and several paradigm shifts). And thankfully I (and the fandom) have an imagination so I can come up with my own cathartic moments to fill that gaping oversight for Tech. (Though the question remains: why do we as the fans have to do this, why didn't the show provide the closure and catharsis??)

I'm just saying: spare me the convenient time skips and "they were busy/they'd moved on already" excuses, Tech should have gotten at least as much attention from ALL his family members honoring his memory as Mayday got from Crosshair.

[ivyblossom]

Lessons in Story: Blather

I've been on a journey with planning and outlining for a long time now, but as a former pantser, it still feels very fresh to me, and everything about it is surprising.

None of this comes naturally to me at all. Once again: when I say "lessons", I mean the lessons I have learned, not lessons of value to anyone else, you're probably better at this than I am. I'm very open to feedback and ideas on planning, this is foreign territory for me.

My biggest revelation about planning and outlining is that, after years of hating and dreading anything even remotely structured, it turns out that I really enjoy this part. It's ridiculous and fun.

My paradigm shift was going from thinking of it as some (ugh!) structured version of writing to it being an entirely different activity. I seems closer to daydreaming than to writing. It doesn't take from the experience of writing, it's adding a new, fun version of composing story that's just as creative and immersive and fun, and even more self-indulgent, it's just from a slightly different vantage point and is less gruelling. It's also easier to do when I'm tired, so I can even see it as something I can do when I don't feel like writing, so it's not even overlapping time-wise.

It's taken me a while to figure how to do this in a way that makes sense and feels good. This is what I've managed so far.

It's blathering. It has no order and no structure, and I'm not sure I even understand what's happening in this process. Maybe one day I will. It comes out as a mess of random thoughts and ideas. It is documented daydreaming.

There have been times when I would just keep all that in my head and have it fuel whatever I did, but that isn't a very reliable or predictable way to function, and it means I'm not making choices between options. So what I'm doing now is to just write it all down, which helps me see it and think about it some more. Once I write it down, it change. Is that weird?

The blather has no rules. It's total free-associating. I write down whatever I'm thinking about related to this story, anything that grabs my attention about it. Things that don't work or things I don't know, things I'm obsessed with, anything. And none of it is artful.

Every time I pick the document up again, I start at the top. I don't reread it. I just blather. I repeat myself. At first it's just bits and pieces of things and me droning on about characters and what I think they're worrying about and wanting, etc. etc. Blather is functional, I don't know why. It helps me make decisions and work through ideas. The ideas get bigger and deeper as I blather about them, and problems emerge and get solved.

At a certain point, the blather starts to coalesce into scenes or pieces of them. And then I start telling myself the story as I know it. Over and over. Eventually I can't tell myself the whole story, I get stuck on some part and spend days circling around it. Sometimes I start telling myself the story from the middle, or work backwards, or whatever appeals to me. But there starts to be a sense of order and linked events, and ideas arrive, spend time in the story, stick around or get kicked out. New day, I start again at the top and tell myself the story again. This is kind of weird and obsessive, but it feels like what I want to be doing, it's like a fidget toy or something.

When I do this enough, eventually I want to start lining up the stuff I know about what happens in the order it happens. I can do that in the document for a bit, but then it starts to get out of hand. Then I start wanting a specific tool that lets me put this in order without putting it in order. Every time I reach this point I try different tools, and none of them work the way I want them to. That might be because I want to do something but not do it at the same time. But that's the point where I want to lay it out in a more structured way, but the thing doesn't have a structure.

At some point, and I don't know what triggers this, but the thing untangles in a way that even though it's not complete yet, it becomes linear. I can line up scenes and it makes perfect sense, I don't need a weird tool. That's the point when I'm ready for a proper outline. I can't say I completely understand what's going on here, but this is what it looks like.

The blathering is so fun I keep doing it even once I've started a formal, structured outline.

That's blather. Maybe there's as better word for it. Maybe there's a better way to do it. I have no idea! But this is what I've settled on. At least it's fun! I'm really glad it's fun, because I only willingly do things that are fun. As I've said, maturity is not my strong suit.

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

About ten years ago it seemed like the dominant paradigm around people I knew who chose pets over children was that they didn't want the responsibility of human children and pets were easier / less pressure

Then about five years ago I noticed a shift where having pets was actually the morally superior option, better for the environment (?), more difficult than human children (??), and ultimately a more merciful choice for the unborn who by virtue of their unbirth would not experience suffering (or anything else, but this is a point for another day), started to see op-eds painting "pet parenthood" as a serious thing that is directly comparable to actual parenthood (just kidding ha ha, unless...?)

But now increasingly I'm seeing things about like, the beauty of self-sacrifice, and you love pets without expecting anything in return, and people have their animals in prams and things and like. . .if you are looking at your pet as a subject to love and respect and for which to sacrifice for 13-18 years with nothing in return, embracing inevitable heartbreak as an inherently beautiful part of the process, spending more on your pet's food than you spend on your own, paying for pet health insurance, pet life insurance, bank accounts for your pet, at some point you need to step back and ask yourself what the hell you are doing

[talonabraxas]

Sirian DNA Lightcode Talon Abraxas The lionsgate Portal August 8th is the luckiest day of the year for manifesting.

The lionsgate portal is the alignment of planets and stars. Every year on August 8th the sun is in Leo, and Orion's belt, the star Sirius, and the Earth all fall into alignment.

This alignment creates a potent energy gateway associated with manifestation, spiritual healing, and transformation.

Sirians and the Ascension

This Ascension process can and will manifest in many different ways, and it is up to all of us collectively to decide how and when this occurs. Creating the Ascension starts with each of us, on the inside. The Sirians tell us that the most important thing to do is to go inside our hearts, be open to Love Unconditionally.

The Sirians are working with individual human beings first, then are giving us hints as to what's happening, as we meet others and form little groups together that interconnect with one another, and then we begin to share our experiences.

Later, this would lead to more conscious understanding of what their/our purpose is in the transformation of planet Earth as it goes into Ascension. The Ascension will be like a key, opening and anchoring the Light Body with the physical, emotional, and mental bodies, allowing them to integrate and thereby give each individual much greater access to higher dimensions and experiences of Oneness with others.

There really would be no "other," because everyone would realize their connection to the whole. Of course, all these things happening would still be the choice of every one.

I know what I'm going to choose...

What the future really holds, I don't know, but I envision a great paradigm shift, and a re-birth for Earth and its symbiotic companions that live here physically and in other dimensions.

We are all here to experience this fantastic journey, and there are many beings from other realms, dimensions, universes, and star systems who are here to help us.

The Sirians are some of those beings. They work with some of us on the third dimension in subtle ways that we cannot easily see with our mere five physical senses, and on higher dimensions in more blatant and direct ways, which we still can't perceive unless we have access to those dimensions.

Well, we do have access, just not usually in a conscious state. So they often work with us in dream states, when our consciousnesses are not being so affected by our personality and ego filters.

The Sirians are etheric in their native form and are now working with many of us not only to activate and open our five higher inter-planetary chakras that have been dormant, but also they are working on our genetic structure.

Human DNA is going to be shifting back to its original twelve-strand from the current double strand; the Sirians are here to aid us in this process.

-Sirius Star System

[grison-in-space]

So the thing I didn't mention in that poll I published yesterday is that the motor initiation piece that is, at the time of this writing, absolutely sweeping the poll as the Worst Thing people struggle with?

It's the specific thing I'm trying to pull together a grant for, perhaps unsurprisingly. But it's also the only one that actually isn't classically conceptualized as executive function. (I know, I know, that feels stupid to me, too.)

See, formally speaking, we describe executive function in terms of higher-order cognitive processes that allow us to complete complex tasks. There is a lot of work on, for example, "set shifting" (which is a particular paradigm for studying the ability to transition between different frames of mind, essentially; it's measuring cognitive flexibility) and on action inhibition / impulse control. (One of my colleagues works on set shifting, in fact, and I might actually take a look at that later.) We also have a lot of work on how individuals make decisions and prioritize conflicting needs.

But the transition between motivation and motion is a lot harder to study, and it doesn't fit so neatly into this top down paradigm, either. Most of the people who study this kind of movement initiation are people who aren't really focused on executive function per se at all. They're mostly people who work on Parkinson's, in fact.

The problem is that the best way to untangle how these systems work is to break specific things and see what impact that has on the overall function, and that means working with animal models. You know what we can't study as easily with animal models? Wanting to move and not being able to initiate self-paced motion—that is, we can't get inside an animal's head to understand what it wants to do in the absence of a moving body to indicate that thing. This is part of why many of our best studied kinds of executive dysfunction involve not doing a thing, rather than doing it: that way you can look at error rates and study a measurable change in behavior.

There are things we can do, though. For example, you can disentangle motivation versus pleasure in a rat that enjoys things but has no motivation to make them happen by asking questions like: I know that rats like water with sugar in it. If I set up a device that squirts a trickle of sugar water into the mouth of the rat, does it close its mouth? What facial expressions does it make? If I put bitrex in the water instead of sugar, does the reaction change? (Yes, emphatically.)

The thing is, motivation is regulated by dopamine... and so is movement. There's good reason to think that neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD and autism are mediated by weird dopamine signaling patterns, and we certainly know that there is a direct relationship between abnormally high dopamine signaling and schizophrenia symptoms... and that abnormally low dopamine will give you Parkinsonian tremors.

Most stimulant meds for ADHD work by upregulating dopamine signaling, too. All of them are associated with increased locomotor activity, among other things. We know that dopaminergic signaling precedes actions in the body, too: you get firing before the actual motion happens.

Somewhere there is a threshold of motion initiation that is getting fuckily disconnected. I have some thoughts about where it is, but I definitely need to run some experiments to check my hypotheses against evidence.

[brightlotusmoon]

TraumaGeek on Facebook

"Autism is not a disorder. The Autistic community always gets pushback when we say this.

The thing is, when most people describe Autistics, they’re describing an Autistic person who is highly distressed. Even the DSM does this - a person can be Autistic and not meet the criteria because they aren’t distressed or traumatized enough to show the stereotypical behaviors associated with Autism. Autistic "regression" is actually trauma symptoms in Autistic people.

Autism is a condition of hyper-function, which isn’t *inherently* an impairment. Autism is a disability because hyper-function requires accommodations for us to be healthy. Autism is *effectively* an impairment because the extensive accommodations we need to be healthy don't exist in a lot of the world.

Autistic nervous systems have many more neural synapses than the typical nervous system. Autistic brains literally have more electricity in them than typical brains. This hyper-connectivity results in sensory sensitivity, emotional intensity, and greater risk of trauma from experiences that would not overwhelm someone with a typical nervous system.

Whenever our hyper-connected bodymind is not supported well, Autistic people develop severe symptoms ranging from depression and anxiety to meltdowns and self-harm.

Most people can’t imagine everything that would need to change for an Autistic person to be happy and healthy and have a well supported nervous system. This is often difficult for us Autistics to figure out for ourselves, so I can understand why allistic people may struggle to understand this at all.

I've known I'm Autistic since fall 2018. I've been working on shifting my environment since then, and I STILL haven't yet been able to figure out everything that needs to change to reduce my allostatic load so that I have less reasons to meltdown or isolate from my safe people. It's a process.

So many things about our world are antagonistic to Autistic nervous systems, but it doesn't have to be this way. We can create spaces for Autistic nervous systems to thrive!

Of course, the end goal is to change the world to be accommodating to all neurotypes. But we can start with small pockets and scale up.

If you're trying to figure out how to create Autistic-friendly spaces for yourself or for a loved one, look to the Autistic community and Neurodivergent-affirming professionals for help.

PS. Disorder and Disability are not the same thing. Autism is a disability. The Neurodiversity Paradigm grew out of disability studies. In an ideal world, accommodations at all levels of disability would be as commonplace as wearing glasses.

Referring to any neurological wiring difference as a disorder feels disrespectful, dehumanizing, pathologizing, and oppressive. It is part of the system we are leaving behind as we move towards a neuro-affirming paradigm.

Note: Everything I in this post is descriptive, not predictive. I am describing what Autism is through the neurodiversity paradigm lens. I am not telling anyone how to define their own experience."

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19tVbpujXi/

[schismusic]

Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile (and me) at 25

It turns out it's very hard for me to talk about Nine Inch Nails on this blog. Not only because it's a band whose catalogue I explored in a very, very weird manner (essentially anything after 2005, barring Hesitation Marks, is terra ignota to me, a guy who fucking shelled out fifty euros as a fourteen-year-old to go see Trent Reznor perform live as his first ever paid gig) but also because what I do know about them has indelibly altered how I function, not just as a musician but as a person as well. Issue is: The Downward Spiral turned thirty last March. Your usual suspects and I ended up giving it another whirl. I hadn't heard it in full in, at that point, a good five years if not more – my memories of it were confused at best. Of course, hearing the whole thing after so long reminded me of the absolute paradigm shift the record was for me (and, doubtless, for many others as well) which led to me finally biting the bullet.

There is another Nine Inch Nails record hitting a special anniversary this year. It perennially exists in the shadow of the other two "classic" NIN records, mostly due to its perceived length, width of scope, breadth of intent, intensity. I'm not a Nine Inch Nails historian, despite the profound interest the band has always sparked within me. I will not pretend to have any special insight to offer within the recording process, the songwriting, the psychology behind any NIN release at all – and especially not a release as personal, as layered, as complicated, and ultimately as definitive as this one. Anyone with ears will however have to agree with this: sure, it might not have singles as iconic, it might not be as concise, it might not capture the zeitgeist as well as its predecessors, but The Fragile hit its twenty-fifth anniversary with what we can only assume to have been the same grace as works like Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Homer's Odyssey, Nintendo R&D1's Super Metroid. It's not even a contest. Pretty Hate Machine, barring a couple of incredible songs that would be absolute standouts in any other discography, is mostly just cute and quite unfocused in a number of crucial ways that make it breathe stilted compared to what's to come. Broken and The Downward Spiral still hit like a truck with very little rough spots – they remain lean, efficient pieces of slaughter machinery – but, as acutely noted by recurring blog guest Francesco Farabegoli, their reliance on heavy guitars seems to be more a byproduct of historical coincidence than that of genuine affection, on Reznor's part, to that specific brand of aggression. As such, it's easier to see them retrospectively as double-bound to phenomena like the Seattle sound's overnight success, or the surprisingly big following garnered by genres like death metal and projects like Ministry. None of this applies to The Fragile. Every single sound design decision in The Fragile stands as well alone as it does within the context of the whole NIN discography up to that point – including the Quake soundtrack, which (if not for its inherent ties to an external vision, not directly pertaining to anyone in the band) might actually be its closest peer in a number of ways.

Following up on the more abstract moments of Quake, for starters, The Fragile by and large foregoes the grid-like structure that even The Downward Spiral still abode to. As a result, most of the album's songs retain a surprising "live" feel to them; however, it has to be noted that the sounds themselves are imprecise, artisanal, acoustically coherent to their own reality, believable within the context of a hypothetical recording space: somewhat damaged, in most scenarios. The irony of saying this about a record whose singles include, among other things, humongous-sounding digitally distorted walls of electric guitars and actual breakbeats does not escape me, of course; but tracks like The Great Below (one of the album's thematic centerpieces) are ultimately so enhanced by the unnaturally warbled synth strings, the alien-sounding acoustic guitars or whatever that fucking pluck even is, the single-tracked lead vocals that it's actually impossible to unhear it, once you've heard it. In other words, The Fragile's ultimate superiority lies within its decision to sound – plain and simple – like it is dying.

What most popular rock and rock-adjacent acts of the 1990s made finally clear is the inextricable connection between grief and anger, mourning and fury. On average, the more personal the record, the clearer the connection between the two. In Utero, Dirt, the more politically charged branches of emo, the bands that most openly associated themselves with the nu metal image all end up converging onto an angst-filled paradox of vehement depression, or abulic bloodlust, if you'd rather. This is also the case with The Downward Spiral – a record that conveniently expresses its sad moments in the form of exactly that: sad moments (A Warm Place and Hurt, to name names). I am also conveniently leaving aside the more overtly sexual side of all the records and movements mentioned – but ultimately, bloodlust and appetite are not just metaphors of destruction, if you catch my drift. All of this somehow ends up actually coalescing into virtually any given second of The Fragile's hour-and-a-half runtime. The irony is that this exact coincidence of sounds and feelings looks a lot like your average sixty-year-old who takes up the habit of looking at obituaries posted on the streets and put in local newspaper – an exquisitely Abruzzese habit, from which I am not exempt.

Pointedly enough, a couple of tracks on the record openly tie into the then-recent demise of Trent Reznor's grandmother Clara, the woman who encouraged him to actually pursue a serious career in music. It gets particularly grim when you realize the instrumental I've just linked above this paragraph – candidly titled I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally – has one single thing written under its title in the CD's booklet: the chilling epigraph "for Clara". I spent a lot of time in a cemetery on November 2nd, 2024, as my family and I waited for the Day of the Dead mass to start. Everyone in town had reunited in the graveyard, with the hilarious result that the place in question was more populated – and noisier, regrettably – than the actual town itself. A literal necropolis, then: a city of the dead, as in quite literally built with them: the little family mausoleums and the big structures comprising multiple assorted burial recesses, if you squint, look like condominiums, late nineteenth-century roofed avenues, suburban villas. Then, those who populate these areas, of course very much alive, speak of things pertaining mostly to people who are alive – and boil with the self-destructive rage pertaining to people who are still alive (self-destuctive, that is, only insofar as other people they know no longer are alive).

I was born on July 11th, 1999; as such, I am about two months older than The Fragile. The fact that this particular record would turn twenty-five the same year as me imposed a redde rationem of some kind: finally face this behemoth, advertised to be more depressing, more horrifying, dirtier and more suffocating than any other NIN record was. And so I did. Mere days after the record's anniversary, my girlfriend would tell me she wasn't feeling the spark anymore. As usual, she'd called it right ��� neither was I, as hard to admit as it was. Grandpa stays buried, much to everyone's chagrin, and I am nowhere closer to making my own Russian Ark than I was when I posted my last piece on here. I fumbled a cute-looking girl a week ago and while on the one hand I knew this was gonna happen and I was going to take it in stride, on the other hand this very much did not happen, which led me to finally listen to Justin Broadrick's Jesu (more on this in another post: it's probably gonna be a fun time, unlike this one). A couple of other things happened – a British girl hit on me after my band played a local underground music club, and then forgot to actually follow suit with her actual plans, luckily for me seeing as she looked to be quite drunk already – but the point still stands: I am the one looking at obituaries, blindly reading on, recognizing last names with a grimace, refusing to engage with my own fallibility.

So twenty-five years on, we have to face the music. Reznor has, so far, never made anything as intense and personal and calculated and brutal and perfect in the etymological sense of the word as The Fragile. Doing so would, in all likelihood, kill him. With Teeth is a record that admits a form of defeat: I'll take a quiet life, I'll take a rock quartet with synths, I don't fucking care about perfection any longer. Hesitation Marks deals in different forms of anxiety, more befitting for a man (at the time) nearing fifty, with a wife and children and an Academy Award or two sitting on his shelf somewhere. Both are mostly cute – I will go so far as to admit I have an actual soft spot for Hesitation Marks, making it the only NIN record outside of the classics that I willingly go out of my way to listen to in full – and ultimately inconsequential. I guess I can certainly aspire to be as inconsequential and cute as these records are, knowing there will forever be a record like The Fragile somewhere behind my back, hiding in the shadows.

[canmom]

one of the interesting things with game dev and tech art is watching new techniques spread across the industry.

an example: videogame ocean water has gotten really good in recent years through fourier noise vertex displacement, better reflection models, etc. etc. - at first it was just a few games where boats are a core part of it, like Sea of Thieves and Valheim, but word spreads through videos like Acerola's, Unreal implements it as a plugin, even old games like No Man's Sky are getting modern water shaders added. and variants of the technique develop to support different use cases (in the game i'm working on, I figured out a way to do it using flipbook displacement textures that is performant enough for standalone vr).

another case, nonphotorealistic cel shading - Arc System Works basically solved this in Guilty Gear Xrd (2014) through some ingenious techniques like editing the normals to get specific shading regions, and that rapidly spread out to the world of nsfw animators. but there other techniques as well, that might instead implement cel-shading in a deferred way as essentially a post-processing effect over traditional lighting - this is the approach used by Hi-Fi Rush for example. but Hi-Fi Rush is definitely informed by the understanding of what makes for 'good cel-shading' - note that classic Rembrandt triangle on the face of the MC when lit in a 3/4 view.

sometimes it's a a genuine technological advancement on the hardware side - like graphics cards with programmable shaders changed everything in the 2000s. but a lot of time, it's just a matter of someone getting a good idea, a way of thinking. and then it becomes a standard practice.

most of the time the algorithms and calculations we use in graphics are incredibly simple, because we are doing millions of them every frame. sometimes we do need to make things more complicated for physical accuracy - GGX speculars are more involved to calculate than good old-fashioned Blinn-Phong - but we're usually trying not to make the ALU cry and so often we're doing the same basic calculations we'd do in the 90s. but now we've gotten used to juggling all these different maps and buffers and data sources in new ways. it's a different paradigm and the shift has taken place within my lifetime.

[hheartsdramas]

joy of whatever version of human life and society this is set in, episodes 29/30 (many expletives ensue because that's how i process):

i am now having to fit all my theories into this fucking paradigm shift. as in, the polycule are all from whatever pre-ice age situation and walked through the door or whatever the fuck

i don't even know how to compute this adorable scene with wan'er because it's so normal and cute but WHAT THE FUCK

so if empress dowager is the one hiding the key does that mean she's from the ice? or whatever the fuck

he hides it better but fan xian is just as WHAT THE FUCK as i am right now

i've had no thoughts because i'm trying to keep up with the palace political drama scheming while also holding the knowledge that they're living in the fucking future

i'm sorry i'm going to adjust to this i promise, i just need to reel for a little bit

is it just me or does royal princess's guard looking a little unsettled about all this evil manipulating

i am also having wild thoughts about this cyclical future and how if fan xian knows things maybe he can stop colonialism and various atrocities of humanity from repeating...but he's probably currently more concerned with staying, like, alive til dinner.

there is a really interesting meta-level debate about the function of government and regulatory bodies and patriotism and political identity happening here and i wish i was smart enough to catch all of it

i have bit of whiplash going from the big bomb drop (was it a bomb?) back to our previously scheduled palace drama, but i trust that the sci fi revelation will come into play in a big way later. i'm still in it fam, don't worry!

[donnerpartyofone]

Hello, Sqwincher Zero and I are here to tell you to take this heat wave seriously. I had never heard of Sqwincher Zero before I took this picture with the intention of making fun of its name, but I sure wished I had some later that night. I will not invite you to scrutinize the series of bad decisions that I made yesterday leading up to a serious and avoidable medical emergency, but suffice it to say that none of these decisions were extreme or unusual for a fun grownup weekend. If anything I dialed it back a little, consciously, and I believed I was drinking plenty of water. It wasn't enough. I was feeling fine until I suddenly wasn't. My awareness of being Severely Dehydrated came on very quickly and then the next few hours were a scary nightmare. I am OK this morning and reviewing certain life choices and also our state of emergency preparedness.

I'm an extremely fortunate person. I have access to clean water, good food, and an amazing person who I tricked into marrying me, so someone is there to help me when I can't help myself. I am also in reasonably good health--which perhaps helped lull me into a false sense of security, especially at an age when my health is inevitably, normally changing, but I just haven't been paying that much attention to it.

Last night when things suddenly became very dark, I was struck with the intense and undeniable awareness that I needed emergency intervention. Like I should have called 911. I knew it for a fact. I have never experienced such a thing before. I could not get past the mental block of admitting that I was having an unprecedented physical crisis. Telling my husband to call 911 just seemed too radical. But I thought about it for hours. I even had a whole fantasy like, OK if my husband called 911 what would they ask him? What would they tell him to do? Instead of acting on this I just gave him little instructions one at a time. Let's draw a cold bath, let's move the fan, let's get a bucket, let's get a couple bottles of water, refill them now please. I was thinking very clearly, I was thinking about my temperature, I was monitoring my water intake versus how often I got sick. The one respect in which I was being irrational (besides my series of careless decisions during the day) was that I could not admit that I needed a doctor.

It's really easy to say things like "Don't be a tough guy, take care of yourself," as if the problem is strictly attitudinal. But switching gears into (for lack of a better term) self-care can be extremely psychologically complex. Being macho or too proud is one thing. Being habitually, neurotically afraid to frighten or inconvenience other people, or ashamed of drawing attention to yourself, is another thing. Being self-destructive and passively suicidal is yet another thing, with deep and insidious roots that can affect more things about your behavior than you even know. And finally, acknowledging that you are experiencing the paradigm shift of a Real Emergency, which might require scary and expensive and unpredictable new activities to get you out of it, is a whole other thing entirely. This is going to sound like an exaggerated reference point but whenever a serial killer is caught and people start saying that the spouse "must have known", they're not factoring in how hard it is to accept that your whole reality is changing and everything is very serious now. Even if the evidence was glaring, it would be a lot to process. There's even a thing in the book Interview With the Vampire as I recall, where somebody says it has been no big deal for vampires to hide their existence through the ages because humans will do extreme mental gymnastics to convince themselves that everything is normal. This all is more or less what was happening with me while I was refusing to call 911. I mean I knew that I should, I just couldn't make the leap.

I should say that my poor husband had no idea how bad it was. To him it just seemed like I'd had a little too much fun, and he was being patient and attentive. None of this is on him, I didn't explain things until I was out of the woods. One thing I feel bad about, that I rarely think about even though it's majorly true, is that not taking care of yourself can frequently, inevitably become someone else's problem. It cannot always stay private and contained forever; if you are incapacitated somehow, you will become someone else's chore.

I want to repeat that I didn't do anything that a normal adult wouldn't do on a Friday night. None of my actions were that extreme in and of themselves; I didn't even have alcohol in my system anymore by the time this struck. But I was not factoring in the weather, or my age, or anything like that that would have been important. We don't have an air conditioner at the moment because we have been luxuriating in our new well-ventilated apartment and enjoying the fact that we can survive with just box fans. I radically underestimated the potential consequences of just toughing it out and going about my business. I need to think more carefully about such things, and mentally reorient myself on preparing for emergencies instead of just reacting "if anything comes up". And I should also supplement our first aid supplies with something that isn't just for cuts and colds. I'm lucky I had cold, clean water, but at some point I really needed electrolytes and vitamins, and there was just nothing to be done for it late at night. I have a lot more thinking to do on this general topic, but it's time for me to get up and drink more water. And maybe go buy some Sqwincher Zero.